What'd We Learn?

We were settling down to study for her history test—chapter 5 on the rise and fall of Rome.  “Do you want me to come to your room, sweetie?”  “No, Mom, I’ll come to you,” she says brightly, plopping her heavy textbook (unread) on the single bed in my office.  She hands me the one-page study guide, filled out with one or two word answers to very complex questions, penned in very childish script.  She is fifteen.  I only have two more years to work with her before the fledgling leaves the nest, and I’m often at a loss.  What will it take, I wonder, to make her feel that opening a book is entering a world?  What will it take to arouse real curiosity?  The text book may be boring and the teacher’s study guide nonsensical, but I wish she would care, even a little, about her schoolwork.  I ask the first question, and she answers correctly but misses the second one—“What style of art most influenced the Romans?”  She wrote “architecture,” and I laugh, “that’s not a style?  Didn’t you read this book?”  When I suggest she take it back to her own room and read it, she starts pulling her blue hair and pummeling her face as if she is a child with some kind of serious disability.  I speak calmly to defuse the situation.  I know my daughter knows things; moreover, I know she tolerates study because she enjoys sitting and talking with me.  I know this, but it is not always at the top of my mind.  It was Katya’s distress that sent it flooding into my brain.  The questions take us into what I suppose is familiar territory, “Who was the Jewish teacher that taught and preached in Judaea and Galilee?”  Jesus!, she says brightly. There is no way for her to miss that one: she was raised a Catholic, went to Catholic elementary school and Lutheran middle school.  And the next question, I think before I ask, should be easy for her as well:  “what was it about Christianity that made it spread so rapidly?”  Her face becomes serious while she begins to say what she knows, “Well, it focused on the person.  It was open to the poor and the lowly even more than the rich.  There were no animal sacrifices, and people didn’t have to pay a lot of money to be initiated.”  I scan the textbook and read selected pieces aloud to her, “and the fact that Jesus was a human being that people knew, made it easy to identify with him.”  She looks at me as if she is about to share a secret.  “So Jesus was real?”  “Yes, of course,” I say, surprised.  This, above all else, seems to matter to her more than anything we’ve gone over in her history book chapter, and maybe it matters even more than years of stories heard in church.  He was real.  If she remembers nothing else about ancient Rome:  the Etruscans, Caesar, the Goth invaders, and the causes of Rome’s decline, I think she may remember that Jesus lived and died.  What’s more, he lived in a very particular way—as strange as the Olmecs and Mayas, the Greeks and Romans and more like the nomadic Kazakhs.  He never had a place to lay his head.  He didn’t cling to things but gave everything he had away:  his cloak, his power, his prayers, his life.  She heard the gospel stories all her life, and I remember her saying once that she was tired year after year of celebrating the birth at Bethlehem to the crucifixion at Calgary.  Now I understand that she was bored with the story, thinking it was just a story.  An unusual college girl who tutored Katya in math, a girl who took pictograph notes in cartoon form, told me once that Kat was a kinesthetic learner.  So I have to hope that maybe after she sits with the knowledge that Jesus was real, she will get up and dance with it, letting it become the idea that Jesus could be real again, depending on what she chooses to do.  Ever since she stopped getting up to come with me to church on Sunday mornings, I’ve had the thought that it is because I failed to make real the words we heard together; I failed to bring them out of church because of my own confusion, my own lack of commitment and love.  If I do anything this Advent, I want her to re-experience the story of the virgin birth—it sounds like a far-fetched story, but it captures or contains the real experience of new life bursting out anywhere, in any person, at any time, even if Mary did not “know” man, even in the bleakest neighborhood of Flint—a city named for rock—water can spill from the faucets and be clear enough to drink.